Affecting voters through eyes and mind? An eye-tracking study to understand how political preferences affect attention and memory of political advertisements

While online political targeting is increasingly used in political campaigns, its effect on voters’ attention toward political advertisements and the extent to which they are remembered remain unclear. This paper reports a within-subjects eye-tracking study (N = 135) to determine whether voters spend more time looking at political advertisements aligning with their political preferences while performing a goal-directed task. Moreover, it examines whether voters recall and recognize political advertisements that align with their preferences better. The results indicate mixed effectiveness, challenging the assumption that political advertisements from a preferred party attract greater visual attention and deeper cognitive processing. Overall, the notion that targeted political ads inherently capture voters’ attention due to higher self-relevance or political alignment is not supported. This study contributes to understanding the complexity and nuances of targeted political advertising’s effectiveness in engaging voters’ attention and cognitive processes.